America Is Doing Far too Little to Protect Its Ports

ˇ°America Is Doing Far too Little to Protect Its Portsˇ± Hardly. More than $600 billion in goods and nearly 50 percent of U.S. imports flow through American ports each year. U.S. ports are vulnerable to both weapons smuggled into the United States in containers and U.S.S. Cole¨Cstyle attacks on ships. But there is little indication such attacks are likely.

ˇ°Corporations Should Spend More on Securityˇ± False. The odds of any one business in the United States being attacked by terrorists are vanishingly small.

ˇ°Terrorists Will Soon Mount a Crippling Cyberattackˇ± Nonsense. Cyberattacks are costly and annoying, but they are not a threat to U.S. national security.

ˇ°Al Qaeda Remains the Largest Threat to U.S. Homeland Securityˇ± Wrong. The organization bin Laden continues to run from Afghanistan or Pakistan is on the ropes. Today, the main threat to the United States comes in the form of extremist entrepreneurs with only tenuous links to bin Laden and from other Sunni terrorist groups.

"Our intelligence community made, apparently, an error, as to the stockpiles" of weapons it assured President Bush existed in 2003, Feith said. Thus that part of the administration's argument for why war was necessary was overdone, he said, adding, "Anything we said at all about stockpiles was overemphasis, given that we didn't find them." ...

Feith said he is irritated by the assertions of administration critics that the absence of WMD stockpiles in Iraq negates the rationale for going to war. They ignore the broader reasoning, he said, which included the dangers posed by Saddam's record of aggression against Kuwait, hostility toward the United States, a "rhetorical and financial support" for terrorism and a weakening of the world's resolve to contain his ambitions.